The first house where we lived as the O’Mahoney family, located on Califa Street in the San Fernando Valley, was small, dark, and rented. That’s all I can remember about it. I could find only two small scalloped-edged photos of that time, not much of a map. One picture is too blurry to uncover anything of interest but in the other I can see a six-year-old Sally, with a pillow and a blanket, nestled on the new sofa in front of the living room window—cheeks flushed with fever and the chicken pox—which leads me to the memory of the delicate pink blossoms on the big oleander bush in the backyard of that house, a wall of leaves that twinkled in the wind and poisoned Dr. Quack, my first pet—obviously, a duck. I remember thinking, Yikes, so this is death. You get totally stiff and smell funny, then you’re stuffed into an old shoe box and buried in the backyard next to the very thing that killed you. Which takes me to the memory of my brother and me hanging over the toilet as Baa tried to make us puke up the rancid ground beef that the babysitter had mistakenly fed us, meat my mother had intended to throw away. Everyone seemed to panic, and though we stuffed our fingers down our throats as best we could, no half-digested ptomaine-laced meat appeared. I never felt sick from whatever it was I’d eaten, but that night I was worried I’d end up in the backyard buried next to Dr. Quack in my own Keds coffin. This is probably around the time I started having meltdowns at school so maybe it’s all beginning to make sense. Part of it at least.
I have a 1953 issue of a fan magazine entitled TV Show. Inside these deteriorating pages is a story called “The Range Rider and His Queen,” which includes thirteen awkwardly posed pictures of us all, photos meant to show a family caught in the midst of real life like only a fan magazine can do. There’s the one showing the three kids sitting directly in front of a television, staring with intense fascination at a round, blank screen, and one of eight-month-old Princess sitting in her high chair, mouth wide open like a baby bird as she waits to get the bottle that is being suspended in front of her by Jocko, looking like a resident of the Ponderosa. Baa—dressed to match—stands on the other side, holding a bowl of something Gerber, both parents beaming with exaggerated adoration toward the camera. Then there’s the picture of my brother and me sitting on the counter next to the kitchen sink, my mother standing slightly in front of Ricky as we watch a now shirtless Jocko scrubbing the bottom of a skillet with an S.O.S pad. Ricky and my mother look intently at Jocko’s helpful hands but I, pressed against the dish rack, have my eyes focused on his face as if awaiting further instructions.
If my mother was the Range Rider’s queen, then we must have been his court.
My favorite photo is an eight-by-ten print of a picture that was obviously taken at another shoot, because my hair is longer, while Baa’s is shorter, and if it was ever in a publication, I don’t have the magazine. In this shot, I’m in the foreground, spinning, arms out straight with the gathered skirt of my dress in midair, and everyone, except Princess—who must have been taking her nap—is in the background watching me twirl. My mother and I are dressed in Navajo-style attire, me with my rickrack-trimmed dress and Baa wearing an enormous turquoise necklace. Jocko looks like the grand marshal of the Tournament of Roses Parade in his fringed leather jacket and huge white cowboy hat, with an “I’ve got the answer, if you’ve got the question” smirk on his face. Poor Ricky sits next to Baa on the new redwood patio bench, drowning in cowboy clothes that are clearly the wrong size and looking as though he’s lost the will to live. What I love about the photo—other than the look on my brother’s face—is the fact that I can see our new backyard, fenceless and carpeted in deep St. Augustine grass, plus I can see all the fenceless yards down to the end of the block. Every one exactly the same.
Twirling in Van Nuys.
This was the place on Hayvenhurst Avenue in Van Nuys, where we lived next. It was a little California ranch–style house in a new development of similar ranch-style houses, the first home we had purchased and the house where Ricky turned nine. I remember my mother filling out the party invitations for my brother’s one and only birthday party, putting them in a bag for Rick to distribute to each of his fourth-grade classmates. Unfortunately, only four of the invited guests showed up and all of them were girls who stood around the paper-covered picnic table looking lost. To this day, my brother insists that the party was a tremendous success, but I’m telling you, it was a life-altering experience. Ricky’s hair was so slicked down he looked like he belonged in a barbershop quartet, and the only entertainment was watching him wandering around the yard blindfolded, determined to pin that damn tail on the donkey’s ass. I vowed, then and there, never to have a party of my own. And since my mother was good at a whole lot of celebratory things but throwing a successful birthday party was not one of them, the vow was easy to keep. My mother was simply not a people person.
Ricky and I weren’t exactly surefooted in the people department either, so our house was never filled with kids from the neighborhood or classmates from school all laughingly full of mischief, and none of this seemed to concern anyone except the woman who lived next door. Shortly after we moved in, she began to gently but regularly invite me to her quiet, neatly kept home, and though it was extremely unusual for me, I slowly began to go. If she was married—and I think she was—her husband was never around, and clearly she had no children. I wish I could remember her name, this nice woman. She wasn’t as pretty as my mother, but she had a careful, eager way. She showed me how to dunk a cube of sugar in my cup of tea—which she served in a flowered cup with matching saucer—then pull the cube out before it melted and suck on it really quick. A sweet treat as we sat at her kitchen table, talking about the day. I started making drawings and little art projects at home, gifts I’d then give to her, my secret friend. I never told anyone about her, especially not Baa. I felt that I was doing something wrong, that there were things about me I should hide. Maybe I worried that it would hurt her feelings knowing that my best friend, my only friend, was a woman her age. I don’t know.
But at that time, both my mother and Jocko were seated in the front car of a huge roller coaster: their lives. Everything was moving at such a dazzling speed—their love affair, the birth of their child, the liftoff of their careers—they must have found it hard to do anything but hang on. Not only was Jocko filming The Range Rider (which ended after seventy-eight episodes) but he was also the lead actor in two B movies and a short film with the Three Stooges. Baa was now working in a constant stream of episodic television, which included performing regularly in the new live television shows, Playhouse 90, Lux Video Theatre, Chevron Theatre, and four episodes of Schlitz Playhouse of Stars. But even if you’re working regularly, being a professional actor doesn’t offer a lot of security. It’s not a nine-to-five job and no two days are the same, no two jobs are the same. When you finish one, you have no idea when, or even if, the next will appear. At that time, however, the work kept coming, and Jocko kept spending the money that rolled in. He also spent the money that hadn’t rolled in.
We lived in the Hayvenhurst house only long enough to harvest a few baskets of walnuts from our front yard tree and for Jocko to teach me to ride a bike. I won’t say he was appalled that I hadn’t learned to ride one by the age of seven, but close enough. In my defense, I’d never had a bike or a safe place to ride it, much less anyone who could or would teach me. But if my stepfather was critical about my lack of cycling skills, he was apoplectic about Rick’s. Grandiose to a fault, one day Jocko brought home a tricycle for his eighteen-month-old daughter and two shiny Schwinn bicycles, big red boys’ bikes with crossbars… both. Neither of them the step-through girl’s type. These were bikes meant for older guys of eleven or twelve, not a small boy of nine and a tiny girl of seven. And if training wheels existed at the time, I never saw any.